CASE STUDY: SUCCESS WITH KENSHOO

Rakuten Marketing Surfs up the ROAS for O’Neill with Kenshoo Optimization

“At O’Neill we’re eager to test the latest paid search technology. Rakuten Marketing recommended Kenshoo’s KPO tool to meet our Shopping ROAS goals. In a short time, our goals were met without sacrificing site traffic. Additionally, media costs decreased versus our previous bidding strategy. This is a huge win for O’Neill and we look forward to ongoing growth with Rakuten Marketing and Kenshoo.”

Tim Willey, Ecommerce Marketing Specialist at O’Neill

The Power of Machine Learning

92%

ROAS

37%

Revenue

29%

Cost

Background

O’Neill is the original California surf, snow and lifestyle brand with high-quality items for men, women, and kids. O’Neill has been working with their Search Partner Rakuten Marketing and Kenshoo for over a year growing their online retail business.

Challenge

While O’Neill & Rakuten Marketing had experienced lots of ROAS success with their Brand and Non-Brand search campaigns, they struggled to realize the same results through Shopping Campaigns. Time and time again, Google Shopping fell below their target ROAS goals.

Solution

The Rakuten Marketing team identified Kenshoo KPO and Google’s Target ROAS with eCPC as two ideal policies to test against each other. A successful result would meet their ROAS goal in the Shopping channel overall without a significant drop in traffic volume. For consistency, they would run the test during a non-peak period and include both Brand and Non-Brand campaigns.

Results

Rakuten Marketing first tested Google’s eCPC alone, then Kenshoo’s KPO alone. Both tests had good results, but the team felt that they might be able to achieve greater success by combining both technologies. They found that eCPC layered with the power of Kenshoo KPO’s machine learning and AI brought their performance to a whole new level. Having the ability to balance between third-party technology and time of auction bid adjustments through Google made for a winning combination. O’Neill reaped the benefits of Rakuten Marketing’s combined technology strategy with a decrease in CPC of 45%, 37% increase in Revenue, 92% increase in ROAS, 3% increase in CVR, and a 47% decrease in CPA. And the best part? Rakuten Marketing achieved a cost savings of 29%!

What’s the important lesson here? The power of Kenshoo can be layered on top of the new and exciting capabilities from the publishers, whether it’s eCPC, Smart Bidding, or whatever the future has in store for us. The publisher tools are good, but Kenshoo makes them great.